firstsite, Lewis Gardens, Colchester Until May 7, 2012 www.firstsite.uk.net

THERE is a line in Nick Cave's magnificent Death Row ballad, The Mercy Seat, where the protaganist says: "I begin to warm and chill, to objects and their fields."

These lyrics came into my head as I wondered around Culpable Earth with its creator/curator Steven Claydon as he explained the ideas behind the pieces.

Our relationship with the material world around us, specifically with objects and the meanings we place on them, is what's explored in this fascinating but challenging exhibition.

At first glance, you might think it's just an array of random objects, just another collection of conceptual art that you can't connect with.

Some tin cans, a ceramic bell hanging above a microphone and amplifier, a cluster of aluminum bricks, a wall of beeswax rectangles, three wall-mounted lights... You can imagine people rubbing their hands in glee, saying, "this isn't art".

But delve deeper, into the thought processes behind the work and the construction processes behind the pieces, and you realise how remarkable the objects we take for granted are.

Steven Claydon is fascinated with the "passage of materials" and how those materials go on a journey from their raw state to finished product, whether that be an everyday object like a tin can or something we place cultural significance on, like a work of art or an exhibit in a museum.

On a guided tour of the exhibition as the finishing touches are being put to it, he talks us through his ideas.

Claydon starts by showing us with what looks like some tin cans and a flask on a plinth with a red frame over them. It turns out the plinth contains a resin panel which contains shredded £10 notes while the cans are actually made of solid wood.

So the plinth, which is usually just there to display the artwork, is embedded with (now defunct) value. The cans, familiar, everyday objects, have had their utility removed but in doing so have been transformed into art and their value has been increased. Claydon is confronting us with this physical and cultural transformation.

And so it continues throughout the exhibition, which is Claydon's first major solo show in the UK.

An array of three industrial lights on a wall come to signify the corpuscular, particle nature of light itself.

A ceramic bell, which feeds back into an amplifier via a microphone, would shatter if you actually hit it, thus belying its very purpose.

A pile of aluminum bricks seems to represent materials at their most basic level, but the manufacture of these bricks is a precise, technical process in itself.

What seems simple at first, is much more complicated on closer inspection.

Claydon continues to look at representations of the everyday by different means in a parallel exhibition, Equivalents, which features five cloud studies by John Constable alongside Carl Andre's controversial sculpture Equivalent VIII, 120 firebricks arranged in rows.

"It's not about 'anyone can do it'," says Claydon of Equivalents. "It's about finding something beautiful.

"The beauty of art is that you can get people to redress things they take for granted."

And that applies as much to clouds as it does to bricks. There's beauty all around us everyday, we just need to realise it.

Darryl Webber